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# Re: Wishful thinking

- Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 10:34:47 PST
- From:
- Cc: moo-cows@parc.xerox.com
- Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

    At 08:33 AM 1/17/96 PST, you wrote:
    >Floating point numbers are the entire backing of our space system on
    >StarMOO. Without them, space would be very inaccurate.

    I fail to see how a measurment such as

    10 meters

    is different from

    1000 centimeters

    Both are exactly the same amount of measument.  Assuming you use a
    relatively small scale than what you are using now, space can be very
    accurate.  $maxint is pretty big (in other words, if you had 3d space
    divided into 'parsecs' (or whatever you want to call your measurment of
    space), and all of the universe consisted of $maxint parsecs by $maxint
    parsecs by $maxint parsecs, then even if you visited one parsec every
    second, you would die long before you visited all of them (my logic here is
    that $maxint / 1000 (thereby dividing each parsec into 1000 smaller
    measurements) is still way more than enough to implement any space system
    you'll need -- divide by 10000, and you still have a largish space system of
    parsecs).
    Math would work the same way, and if you absolutely NEED decimal places,
    assume 3 (or 4 for division by 10000) decimal places when you print it out
    (ie 12345 => 12.345).  While this isn't ideal for ALL math applications, it
    will more than serve any needs you have with creating space.

    herf.

Follow-Ups:

- Floats? (was Re: Wishful thinking)

- From: tom@mvision.com (Tom Ritchford)

- Re: Wishful thinking

- From: Joe Shaw <joeshaw@eskimo.com>

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